Et le soleil dessechez et noirciz;
Pies, corbeaulx, nous ont les yeux cavez,

Et arrachez la barbe et les sourcilz.
Jamais, nul temps, nous ne sommes rassis;

Puis ca, puis la, comme le vent varie,
A son plaisir sans cesser nous charie,

Plus becquetez d'oiscaulx que dez a couldre.
Ne soyez donc de nostre confrairie,

Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre."
Here is some genuine thieves' literature after so much that

was spurious; sharp as an etching, written with a shuddering
soul. There is an intensity of consideration in the piece

that shows it to be the transcript of familiar thoughts. It
is the quintessence of many a dolefulnightmare on the straw,

when he felt himself swing helpless in the wind, and saw the
birds turn about him, screaming and menacing his eyes.

And, after all, the Parliament changed his sentence into one
of banishment; and to Roussillon, in Dauphiny, our poet must

carry his woes without delay. Travellers between Lyons and
Marseilles may remember a station on the line, some way below

Vienne, where the Rhone fleets seaward between vine-clad
hills. This was Villon's Siberia. It would be a little warm

in summer perhaps, and a little cold in winter in that
draughty valley between two great mountain fields; but what

with the hills, and the racing river, and the fiery Rhone
wines, he was little to be pitied on the conditions of his

exile. Villon, in a remarkably bad ballad, written in a
breath, heartily thanked and fulsomely belauded the

Parliament; the ENVOI, like the proverbial postscript of a
lady's letter, containing the pith of his performance in a

request for three days' delay to settle his affairs and bid
his friends farewell. He was probably not followed out of

Paris, like Antoine Fradin, the popular preacher, another
exile of a few years later, by weeping multitudes; (1) but I

daresay one or two rogues of his acquaintance would keep him
company for a mile or so on the south road, and drink a

bottle with him before they turned. For banished people, in
those days, seem to have set out on their own responsibility,

in their own guard, and at their own expense. It was no joke
to make one's way from Paris to Roussillon alone and

penniless in the fifteenth century. Villon says he left a
rag of his tails on every bush. Indeed, he must have had

many a weary tramp, many a slender meal, and many a to-do
with blustering captains of the Ordonnance. But with one of

his light fingers, we may fancy that he took as good as he
gave; for every rag of his tail, he would manage to indemnify

himself upon the population in the shape of food, or wine, or
ringing money; and his route would be traceable across France

and Burgundy by housewives and inn-keepers lamenting over
petty thefts, like the track of a single human locust. A

strange figure he must have cut in the eyes of the good
country people: this ragged, blackguard city poet, with a

smack of the Paris student, and a smack of the Paris street
arab, posting along the highways, in rain or sun, among the

green fields and vineyards. For himself, he had no taste for
rural loveliness; green fields and vineyards would be mighty

indifferent to Master Francis; but he would often have his
tongue in his cheek at the simplicity of rustic dupes, and

often, at city gates, he might stop to contemplate the gibbet
with its swinging bodies, and hug himself on his escape.

(1) CHRON. SCAND., p. 338.
How long he stayed at Roussillon, how far he became the

protege of the Bourbons, to whom that town belonged, or when
it was that he took part, under the auspices of Charles of

Orleans, in a rhyming tournament to be referred to once again
in the pages of the present volume, are matters that still

remain in darkness, in spite of M. Longnon's diligent
rummaging among archives. When we next find him, in summer

1461, alas! he is once more in durance: this time at Meun-
sur-Loire, in the prisons of Thibault d'Aussigny, Bishop of

Orleans. He had been lowered in a basket into a noisome pit,
where he lay, all summer, gnawing hard crusts and railing

upon fate. His teeth, he says, were like the teeth of a
rake: a touch of haggard portraiture all the more real for

being excessive and burlesque, and all the more proper to the
man for being a caricature of his own misery. His eyes were

"bandaged with thick walls." It might blow hurricanes
overhead; the lightning might leap in high heaven; but no

word of all this reached him in his noisome pit. "Il
n'entre, ou gist, n'escler ni tourbillon." Above all, he was

fevered with envy and anger at the freedom of others; and his
heart flowed over into curses as he thought of Thibault

d'Aussigny, walking the streets in God's sunlight, and
blessing people with extended fingers. So much we find

sharply lined in his own poems. Why he was cast again into
prison - how he had again managed to shave the gallows - this

we know not, nor, from the destruction of authorities, are we
ever likely to learn. But on October 2d, 1461, or some day

immediately preceding, the new King, Louis Eleventh, made his
joyous entry into Meun. Now it was a part of the formality

on such occasions for the new King to liberate certain
prisoners; and so the basket was let down into Villon's pit,

and hastily did Master Francis scramble in, and was most
joyfully hauled up, and shot out, blinking and tottering, but

once more a free man, into the blessed sun and wind. Now or
never is the time for verses! Such a happy revolution would

turn the head of a stocking-weaver, and set him jingling
rhymes. And so - after a voyage to Paris, where he finds

Montigny and De Cayeux clattering, their bones upon the
gibbet, and his three pupils roystering in Paris streets,

"with their thumbs under their girdles," - down sits Master
Francis to write his LARGE TESTAMENT, and perpetuate his name

in a sort of glorious ignominy.
THE LARGE TESTAMENT.

Of this capital achievement and, with it, of Villon's style
in general, it is here the place to speak. The LARGE

TESTAMENT is a hurly-burly of cynical and sentimental
reflections about life, jesting legacies to friends and

enemies, and, interspersed among these many admirable
ballades, both serious and absurd. With so free a design, no

thought that occurred to him would need to be dismissed
without expression; and he could draw at full length the

portrait of his own bedevilled soul, and of the bleak and
blackguardly world which was the theatre of his exploits and

sufferings. If the reader can conceive something between the
slap-dash inconsequence of Byron's DON JUAN and the racy

humorous gravity and brief noble touches that distinguish the
vernacular poems of Burns, he will have formed some idea of

Villon's style. To the latter writer - except in the
ballades, which are quite his own, and can be paralleled from

no other language known to me - he bears a particular
resemblance. In common with Burns he has a certain rugged

compression, a brutal vivacity of epithet, a homelyvigour, a
delight in local personalities, and an interest in many sides

of life, that are often despised and passed over by more
effete and cultured poets. Both also, in their strong, easy

colloquial way, tend to become difficult and obscure; the
obscurity in the case of Villon passing at times into the

absolute darkness of cant language. They are perhaps the
only two great masters of expression who keep sending their

readers to a glossary.
"Shall we not dare to say of a thief," asks Montaigne, "that

he has a handsome leg?" It is a far more serious claim that
we have to put forward in behalf of Villon. Beside that of